Learning to Sit with Noise

When Radiohead recorded "Kid A," they spent months trying to write a proper follow-up to "OK Computer" and kept scrapping everything. What changed was they stopped trying to make it sound finished. The album is full of vocals processed until they're barely intelligible, rhythms that never lock in, and melodies that dissolve before resolving.

The distortion functions as a structural element rather than a technical limitation. Removing it yields a fundamentally different, likely lesser, work.

The impulse to correct things seeks a correct version to arrive at. That imperfection represents distance from some ideal state, and with enough adjustment you can close that distance.

This works for deterministic systems with knowable states where you can identify deviation and apply correction. Complex systems, however, rarely work that way; they lack ideal states to converge toward. In these contexts, the imperfection carries the signal itself.

Signal and Noise

Signal theory dictates we maximize signal-to-noise ratio, filter out interference, and preserve the message. This relies on a clear distinction between information and corruption - knowing exactly what the message is supposed to be.

Most things worth paying attention to lack that clear distinction. The variation carries information unavailable through other channels. Trying to optimize it out just collapses the possibility space into something more predictable but less true.

What's Left

This pattern persists in engineering. I often spend hours refactoring code that already works, seeking a version that "feels" right, treating the current state as provisional. Yet sometimes that search imposes a framework that doesn't actually fit the problem.

The discomfort with leaving things imperfect might be the only honest signal that the work doesn't require polishing. The compulsion to fix things seeks a measurable correctness, a certainty that the right configuration has been reached.

"Everything In Its Right Place" is built from vocals processed into something artificial and unsettling, piano that loops and stutters, and sounds that deliberately resist naturalism. It doesn't try to hide that artificiality; that artificiality is the entire substance of it.

The longer you sit with it, the less it feels like interference. Sometimes the noise is all there is.